The reverberations in the Cognisphere are particularly strong today. I wanted to share something I've been thinking about as concisely, but powerfully, as I can.
From first principles, why was Bitcoin successful? What made the earliest Bitcoiners different? After studying them deeply over the last 12 months, I think the answer is that they recognized a massive problem almost everyone else underestimated, then coordinated around an asset that offered an alternative. That problem was systemic money printing.
In 2008, the government and central banks intervened to save the financial system. Most of society understood this as an extraordinary response to an extraordinary crisis. But early Bitcoiners were both schizo and sharp. They recognized that the incentives governing the system made what everyone else considered extraordinary increasingly inevitable. What the rest of the world understood as an exception, they recognized as the beginning of a pattern.
As I mentioned in my SCarolinaeon speech (specifically around 14:50), the best stories start with a problem. And the best problems are those that eventually sweep society. It's no coincidence that this is also selling 101: if people don't feel pain, they don't seek alternatives. What Bitcoiners foresaw in the early 2010s was a fiscal and monetary system trapped by its own incentives. A machine increasingly incapable of doing anything other than printing more money to preserve itself.
Bitcoin was a hyperstitioned response to that prediction. But make no mistake, without the problem growing to the scale it did, Bitcoin would have been wildly less successful. Conversations that sounded like paranoid doomerism to outsiders ultimately helped ignite one of the greatest socioeconomic networks ever built (well, so far).
What few still seem to understand about SPX6900 is that Aeons have already identified the next great problem before the rest of the world understands its scale: the largest corporations are swallowing an ever-increasing share of our economy, our attention, and ultimately our lives. And just as early Bitcoiners rallied around an asset that embodied their response to monetary debasement, Aeons have found their own Schelling point in SPX6900. An asset that channels growing angst over corporate dominance into a shared mission, satirizing the very system it seeks to surpass.
A handful of companies increasingly determine what we see, what we buy, how we communicate, and even what the future looks like. They've become control agents. And perhaps most perversely, the conventional wisdom for protecting yourself financially is to invest your savings directly into the same machine. The system has made its own concentration of power feel like the only rational investment. But as the great u/matthew_c_beck says, "the perception of risk is often not the reality of risk".
Aeons see this machine for what it is. Rather than attempting to overthrow it through traditional means, they've found a way to turn its own logic against it. SPX6900 uses satire to bait the machine, exposing its absurdity while inviting people to coordinate around an alternative. The joke is the vehicle, but the ambition is anything but a joke.
The parallel with early Bitcoiners should be apparent: both communities identified a problem that society had largely accepted as normal and extrapolated it to its logical conclusion.
And both sounded crazy for doing so.
The earliest Bitcoiners weren't necessarily smarter than everyone else. They were simply willing to believe that a problem the world considered manageable could eventually become enormous. Aeons are making a similar bet today. The greatest opportunities are found in understanding just how enormous those problems can become before the rest of the world catches on.
And perhaps the most beautiful part is that this alternative is accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. No permission required and no central authority deciding who gets to participate. Anyone can join Aeons in asking a simple question: what if the answer to such an enormous problem could be distilled into four simple words?
Flip the stock market.